Can the human mind exist without a functional body? The degree connection between the body and mind is a topic that many people find controversial. Many people believe that the mind is an entity of its own and completely separate from the body. Others state that the body is the biggest influence on the shape of the mind. Though the mind can seem independent from the body at times, it is never truly free. The mind is inseparable from the body it inhabits. A damaged or lost body has immense effects on a person’s grip on their mind and their sense of self. Furthermore, the self is influenced and tied to the characteristics of the body it inhabits. The mind cannot function properly without a fully functional body. The complexities of the mind …show more content…
In the novel Neuromancer, the character of Dixie Flatline lacks a meat body. Dixie Flatline was a talented computer hacker until he flatlined while in the matrix. Now, he only exists in the matrix as a ROM construct who can’t create memories or change at all. Case, the main character, asks him if he is a sentient. Dixie replies, "’Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess’" (10. 103-104). Dixie’s mind and self is reduced to a construct, because the mind is fatally tied to the body. Dixie has no body, so he is not truly sentient. Both Dixie and Case seem to know that, which is why Case asked and DIxie couldn’t provide a concrete answer. Because Dixie is generated by a computer, he can only act in predictable patterns. Throughout the novel, Dixie’s only wish is to be deleted. He is not leading a fulfilling existence as a ROM construct. He sees no meaning of life without a body, and has no personality or chance for growth. A woman named Christina also loses her sense of self after she loses her sense of proprioception. Proprioception is a “sixth sense” - it is a person’s ability to sense the relative position of their body parts. Christina suffers the loss of this, essentially losing sense of her own body. She described her condition, “‘ I feel my body is blind and deaf to itself… it has no sense of itself’” (Sacks 51). …show more content…
The mind is limited by the body on what it can accomplish. The unique case of Madeline J and her hands help illustrate this concept. Madeline J was an elderly blind lady who had cerebral palsy and no control over her hands. She described her hands as “‘useless godforsaken lumps of dough - they don’t even feel part of me” (Sacks 59). She went about life as if she had no hands, because she couldn’t access them. Though she learned to live life without them, she was never satisfied. Madeline J visited doctor after doctor. Finally, a doctor was able to help. He triggered an impulse in her hands by placing food near her but not feeding her. One day Madeline J got hungry and impatient, and this prompted her hands to reach out and grab the food. After this event, Madeline rapidly gained use of her hands. This change in her body radically changed her mind and self. Though she was still blind, she began to touch and feel everything to recognize items. This recognition went with “vivid delight, and a sense that she was discovering a world full of enchantment, mystery and beauty” (Sacks 62). This delight and wonder inspired her to reproduce the objects she could now touch and hold. She made beautiful art with her hands that now seemed to have “preternatural animation and sensibility” (Sacks 63). Her change in body completely changed how her mind perceived of the world, and altered her sense of self. She went
When contemplating the relationship between the mind and body, most philosophers advocate either dualism, the view that the mind and body belong to the mental and physical categories respectively, or physicalism, the stance that there is only the physical. (Gertler 108) Brie Gertler upholds the former perspective, and her essay In Defense of Mind-Body Dualism aims to disprove physicalism by establishing the possibility of experiencing pain without the firing of C-fibers, which physicalists believe is identical to pain. (110) She claims that thought experiments are best for determining matters of possibility, but only if such experiments utilize “sufficiently comprehensive” concepts. After first clarifying why Gertler emphasizes the need for
Daniel Dennett tackles these mind and body questions in his essay, Where Am I. In Daniel Dennett’s, Where Am I, Dennett agrees to undergo an operation with would remove his brain from his body and insert an antennae that would enable his brain to control his body remotely. When Dennett wakes up, he finds that he doesn’t know where he is, but not in that sense that he was geographically lost. Dennett has woken up to find himself in his body without his brain, leaving him with the question, where am I? Is Dennett still in his body, in his brain, or in some cross-section between the two?
The 'mind-body' problem has troubled philosophers for centuries. This is because no human being has been able to sufficiently explain how the mind actually works and how this mind relates to the body - most importantly to the brain. If this were not true then there would not be such heated debates on the subject. No one objects to the notion that the Earth revolves around the sun because it is empirical fact. However, there is no current explanation on the mind that can be accepted as fact. In 'What is it like to be a bat?', Thomas Nagel does not attempt to solve this 'problem'. Instead, he attempts to reject the reductionist views with his argument on subjectivity. He
I would like to begin this paper by addressing what question I hope to answer through the entirety of this paper: is the mind physical? As simple as this question may seem to be, there still, to this day, is not a definite answer. There are, mostly, two approaches to answering this problem, through dualism or physicalism. The dualist, for the purposes of this paper, simply believes that the mind and the body are not equal and therefore, they are not one in the same. The physicalist, however, would come back to say that there are no such things as non-physical objects and therefore, they would conclude that the body and the mind are both physical. After weighing on both sides of this argument, I am going to defend the physicalist ideas and
Summary: The problem of the soul continues as Descartes suggested that the human is composed of two completely different substances; a physical body which Descartes compares with a machine, and a non-physical mind, related to the soul, that allows humans to think and feel even if it has no “measurable dimensions” (67). But Elizabeth put in doubt his ideologies when she realized that a non-physical thing doesn’t have the strength to push and move the body. This led to several questions unanswered and also let space for other materialist theories such as behaviorism, mind-brain identity, and functionalism, which also fail in offering an explicit solution.
Armstrong begins his paper with a question for the reader of what it means to have a mind. It is well understood that man has the ability to perceive, to think, to feel, and so on, but what does it mean to perceive, to think, and to feel? The answer, he believes, lies in science. Seeing that science is constantly and rapidly gaining ground, he asserts that “...we can give a complete account of man in purely physico-chemical terms” (295?) Pointing out the fact that this view has been accepted by various scientists throughout time, he explains it is the most reliable way to approach the mind-body problem.
Thomas Nagel approaches the mind body problem in a different manner. Nagel acknowledges that there is a close connection between mental life and the body, but he further questions the origin of our
The mind-body problem is an age-old topic in philosophy that questions the relationship between the mental aspect of life, such as the field of beliefs, pains, and emotions, and the physical side of life which deals with matter, atoms, and neurons. There are four concepts that each argue their respective sides. For example, Physicalism is the belief that humans only have a physical brain along with other physical structures, whereas Idealism argues that everything is mind-based. Furthermore, Materialism argues that the whole universe is purely physical. However, the strongest case that answers the commonly asked questions such as “Does the mind exist?” and “Is the mind your brain?” is Dualism.
The mind is perhaps the most fascinating part of the human body due to its complexity and ability to rationalize. In essence, the mind-body problem studies the relation of the mind to the body, and states that each human being seems to embody two unique and somewhat contradictory natures. Each human contains both a nature of matter and physicality, just like any other object that contains atoms in the universe. However, mankind also is constituted of something beyond materialism, which includes its ability to rationalize and be self-aware. This would imply that mankind is not simply another member of the world of matter because some of its most distinctive features cannot be accounted for in this manner. There are obvious differences between physical and mental properties. Physical properties are publically accessible, and have weight, texture, and are made of matter. Mental properties are not publically accessible, and have phenomenological texture and intentionality (Stewart, Blocker, Petrik, 2013). This is challenging to philosophers, because man cannot be categorized as a material or immaterial object, but rather a combination of both mind and body (Stewart, Blocker, Petrik, 2013). Man embodies mind-body dualism, meaning he is a blend of both mind and matter (Stewart, Blocker, Petrick, 2013). The mind-body problem creates conflict among philosophers, especially when analyzing physicalism in its defense. This paper outlines sound
One, such as Descartes, might argue that because the brain has a physical presence, it is solely an entity of the body; the mind consists only of the intangibles. My response to such a statement is that because the mind exists only in the synapses that comprise the brain, the mind and brain are inseparable and therefore a single entity. Moods and complex emotions are heavily influenced by physical properties of the brain, such as the levels of certain chemicals. The loss of certain components of the brain can lead to an alteration of the mind as well. For example, Alzheimer’s disease causes dementia, a severe alteration of the mind, by destroying certain neurons and synapses. No other organ or appendage of the human body possesses this quality. The removal of a spleen or loss of a limb cannot permanently alter the mind on a primary level.
It can be very difficult to find a universal proposal that offers a solution to the mind body problem. While solutions to this problem differ greatly, all attempt to answer questions such as: What makes a mental state mental? What is the fundamental nature of the mental? Or more specifically speaking, what makes a thought a thought? Or what makes a pain a pain? In an attempt to answer these questions, many philosophers over the centuries have rejected, proposed, or altered preexisting theories in order to keep up with the thinking and science of their times. Entering the 21st century their still exit a plethora of theories, some stronger than others, which include Cartesian dualism, physicalism,
exists except from matter so therefore the mind and the body (brain) work together and
The mind and body problem can be divided into many different questions. We can consider or ask by ourselves that what is the mind? What is the body? And do both of them are co-existing, or does the mind only exist in the body? Or does the body only exist
Some would choose to declare that every human being is both a body and a mind. Both being gelled together until death, than having the mind go on to exist and the body being lifeless. A person lives throughout two collateral histories, one having to do with what happens to the body and in it, and the other being what happens in and to the mind. What happens to the body is public and what happens to the mind is private. The events which reply to the body consist of the physical world, and the events of the mind consist of the mental world.
The Mind-Body problem arises to Philosophy when we wonder what is the relationship between the mental states, like beliefs and thoughts, and the physical states, like water, human bodies and tables. For the purpose of this paper I will consider physical states as human bodies because we are thinking beings, while the other material things have no mental processes. The question whether mind and body are the same thing, somehow related, or two distinct things not related, has been asked throughout the history of Philosophy, so some philosophers tried to elaborate arrangements and arguments about it, in order to solve the problem and give a satisfactory answer to the question. This paper will argue that the Mind-Body Dualism, a view in